Comment by themafia
6 hours ago
> It has really become tiring to have a comment tree on every HN post
Has it actually? Why is this "tiring?"
> When can we be done with these cheap comments?
Do what most other people did. Write a cheap reply.
> you are taking that time to write a comment that only detracts from a possible conversation.
Just click the little [-].
> maybe you just close it and move on.
Ironic.
You do have a point there. I did forget about the [-].
However, I read the comments in hopes they are interesting. If we have a culture where the "I don't know what this thing is"-type comment is popular, people will post those comments more and more. This leads other people to spend their time replying to it, instead of engaging with the content of the article. In other words, it distracts other commenters, who might otherwise have contributed something good.
Second, I think having low value comments is undesirable by itself. We could all start posting "First!" on articles, and everyone who hates that can simply minimize them. I think you can see why that would not be great. We can argue whether this is a low-value comment but I already did that in my original reply: it is not addressed to the article author (in this case they happened to show up but generally they don't) so the complaint doesn't lead to anything, and the comment complains about having to read about a concept they are not familiar with, but does the exact same thing itself.